


call every girl we ever met maria

by principessa



Series: all you have is an axe to grind [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Chasind Hawke, Childbirth, Eloping, Gen, Origin Story, Pre-Game(s), Pregnancy, Red Hawke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 02:57:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12974331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/principessa/pseuds/principessa
Summary: 'There’s something inherently romantic in eloping. Leandra never liked romance novels, but she does love her husband, even if life with him so far is harder than anything she could have ever dreamed of.'Leandra Hawke elopes. It's harder than she thought it would be, but she ultimately decides it's worth it.





	call every girl we ever met maria

There’s something inherently romantic in eloping, is the thing, and Leandra knows that it’s stating the obvious – particularly in her case, a promised young noblewoman from a family of good standing, running away with a mercenary apostate, and a Ferelden at that. It’s like something out a of a novel: forbidden courtships, unplanned pregnancies, interventions from the templars and daring escapes from the Gallows. Grey Wardens, even, though Malcolm won’t tell her how, exactly, they got involved, nor why. And now they have exactly what they always wanted: each other, entirely, with nothing but the future ahead of them.

The thing is, however, that novels often tend to gloss over the unsavoury details in the name of not alienating their readers, and Leandra never liked them overmuch anyways. No romance serial ever mentioned that eloping means spending weeks in the hold of a ship, your newly-named husband rubbing your back as you’re sick in a bucket, the rocking hull doing nothing to soothe your stomach; or how you only have a few changes of clothing and that bathing daily is a dream from a past life, your back occasionally erupting into painful spots from rubbing against sweaty shirts too often; or that food is now salted jerky and small apples and hard camp bread, with teas and tisanes that Malcolm brews to help with your nausea and insomnias.

No, Leandra never liked romance novels, but she does love her husband, even if life with him so far is harder than anything she could have ever dreamed of.

She knows he expects her to complain about it, his soft noblewoman love, with hands that have never done anything but needlework and calligraphy and the Antivan viola, small in his own rough ones, fighter’s hands, calloused from gripping staffs and staves and spears, ropes and farmer’s scythes, something new from each past life he tells her about in his halting, quiet way when she grips his hand and silently asks for distraction. He expects her to complain, so Leandra doesn’t. She refuses to be that woman, that girl, who runs away with nary a thought in her mind and then can’t live with the consequences. Even if part of her desperately wants to turn tail and run back home to her parents if only for a proper bubble bath and silk sheets, she doesn’t pay it any heed.

Leandra Hawke won’t let it be said that she gave anything less than her entire self to this new life at Malcolm’s side, not even by him, not even by her.

They stay for a time in Highever, the time for the baby to be born. Leandra knows that Malcolm would rather the child be born in Gwaren, closer to the wilds where he grew up, but she puts her foot down – she won’t give birth off the side of the Imperial Highway or in some bog when she can do it in a town. Malcolm takes work, as a day-worker at the docks and the forge, hauling crates and doing deliveries and making his already excessively wide shoulders wider with the work. Leandra contributes as well as she can, which isn’t much. Most of her skills would lend well to being a tutor to young ladies, but that would reveal far too much about who she is, which they’re trying to avoid as much as possible out of fear of the Templars; Leandra doesn’t one bit doubt that grandfather would still have them on their tail. Instead she puts her knowledge of needlework to a more practical use, and mends laundry for four bits a bundle. It doesn’t bring in much, not much at all, but she can tell that Malcolm approves of the initiative, and, well, she doesn’t want to be useless. It’s hardly throwing balls and holding charity events, but she is no longer the Lady Leandra Amell, and if Leandra Hawke is to be a laundry-woman to help support her growing family, so be it.

They live in a tiny apartment, just enough room for a bed and a hearth and a little kitchen to cook in, with a shared washroom for the rest of the floor. Their neighbours are kind: a well-off (for elves, anyways) elven family who work for the grocer’s; a group of three young dock-workers who share a single room and always call Leandra madame; one of the whores from the brothel by the port, a middle-aged no nonsense woman with a brilliant smile who offers Leandra advice on stretches to deal with her back pain. As time goes on it almost feels as if the entire lot of them feel a claim to the child, with how much they fuss over her, although Leandra sullenly tells Malcolm that they’re not the ones who have to piss every ten minutes and can’t see their damn feet. He laughs and tells her that her feet are swollen and wide, and then takes them into his lap to rub them when she swats at him, presses a thumb hard into her aching arches in apology.

That, too, is a language she learns. Malcolm doesn’t speak much, she knew that already: her awkward, aggressive apostate. He is quick to anger, but he never once raises her voice without immediately looking stricken, chagrined, fumbling out something in guise of an apology. Leandra never feels unsafe with him, just frustrated at his lack of communicative skills – she teases him sometimes, calls him a dark and handsome stranger, brooding and silent. “I don’t brood,” he replies, mouth pulled into a frown, and Leandra laughs. At night he lies behind her in their little bed with its scratchy sheets and combs her hair; he’s tried to braid it into thick boxy twists like his own, but it doesn’t quite have the texture for it, so instead he showed her better ways to section it out of her eyes and tie it back with scarves than her nurses ever did. He tells her Chasind legends, or histories, whispers them into her neck like they’re sacrosanct. Maybe he thinks they are; she can’t tell which parts are story and which are fact, if he believes either or both. He claims to have a cousin who was stolen by a Witch of the Wilds, who was never seen again after wandering after fairy lights into a bog despite warnings not to from everyone they knew. He tells her how he looks at the statue of Andraste at the Chantry of Our Lady Martyr and does not see the prophetess but the woman he calls Winter, because the Chasind have four war goddesses, one per season. He tells her how the Hawke family – he calls it a clan – has given witches and shamans for generations, how his great-great-grandmother knew how to turn into a hawk, and how she always knew when her children were misbehaving because she saw it from above with her eagle eye.

She asks him if he is a shape-changing witch too, then, if he was that one persistent bird that tapped at her window her entire childhood, and he just tucks hair behind her ear and presses a kiss to her neck. Leandra still doesn’t know the answer. It doesn’t bother her as much as she thought it would. She simply tells him they aren’t naming their children after birds, thank you very much, having Hawke as a surname is enough.

On the topic of names, they debate sometimes over tea, when Malcolm returns from work exhausted in the evening and Leandra sets her sewing away, settling better onto the single chair. They both agree that names are important – they have power, in Malcolm’s words. They each have important people they would honour if they could: Ser Carver, who helped Malcolm flee the Gallows by destroying his phylactery; Grandmother Bethann, who swore foully in Antivan and always told Leandra to be as mischievous as possible, so that she might find someone who loved her at her worst and then learned to know her at her best. They can’t quite decide who ought to come first, though, and joke that if they’re lucky they’ll have twins, so they won’t have to pick.

“I think I’d like something in M,” Leandra tells him one day, shifting in her seat.

“Like Malcolm is?” he asks, grunting as he pushes a stinging homemade poultice into a broken callous on his palm.

“That’s not why,” Leandra lies. He looks at her like he can see right through her, but she powers on. “I had a friend growing up named Miriam who was very dear to me, so perhaps something similar.”

“For a girl,” Malcolm specifies, and Leandra nods, yes, for a girl. She can feel it in her hips and her breasts, that it’s a girl.

Her husband hums, thinking over it, the way he thinks over everything he says, taking a few seconds before he answers. She’s used to the lulls now, takes comfort in them where they had occasionally annoyed her when they first met in Kirkwall over a year ago. “M for a girl is fine,” he says, “There was a soothsayer in my village named Masha. She helped me pick my tattoos.”

“Masha?”

“It’s a short-name. Her real name was Maria. Nobody ever uses long-names. Not unless they’re mad at you.”

“Maria is lovely,” Leandra remarks. “It’s the same name as Miriam, I think. Maria, Miriam, Marian, they all have the same root, I’d think. It’s Tevene, and then it transformed as it was carried to different parts of the Empire and changed over the years.”

Malcolm listens to her with a look of fierce concentration that means more to her than any sappy look. Her husband looks at her and listens to her, giving every word his utmost attention. He likes to listen to her tell the histories she learned at school, at her tutors’ side and the one year she spent at the University in Markham that she fought tooth and nail for. Sometimes he snorts, corrects history of Ferelden when she tells it, often shakes his head at things and calls it Andrastian nonsense, but he listens. For someone who, for so long, was simply a pretty face with wit and a rich dowry, it’s worth every hardship she lived since giving up her past life.

Maria Hawke is born in the summer, although even that is bitingly cold by Leandra’s standards. The question of whether she will be blessed at the Chantry, something that Leandra and Malcolm have fought about more than once, never comes up: when Leandra breaks Malcolm’s hand from holding it too hard during the birthing, he sets it right with magic without a thought, in view of all their neighbours. She doesn’t complain, even if a part of her holds it against him: with the secret out, he is able to take more part in the process, making sure it goes smoothly in the tense silence of the room, fire setting water to boiling for rags, ice to cool her brow. She suspects that he’s doing something else, that she isn’t bleeding as much as she should, but she can’t – she won’t ask him.

Afterwards, she starts to realise, truly, what it means to be an apostate, or to be married to one, beyond the fear of Templars. Her no-nonsense whore neighbour wipes blood off the baby and hands her to Leandra, looks at her with a pitying look in her eyes and shakes her head. One of the nice docker boys says, “I think you ought to get moving as soon as you’re good to walk, madame,” not unkindly but entirely removed from the almost familial tone he and his friends used those past months. The elven family vanished: they’re under scrutiny as is, the father explains in hushed whispers, they can’t be seen associating with apostates or they’ll be expulsed to an alienage or worse. It’s one of the most isolating moments in Leandra’s life, and she doesn’t know if she’s weeping from heartache or exhaustion when Malcolm wipes tears from her face brusquely. She holds Maria to her breast and watches the child who barely cries, doesn’t fuss. It seems she take after Malcolm, then, she thinks weakly, pokes her dark little nose, strokes her thick, already-curling hair. Mother always said that Leandra wailed for the first three years of her life, often egging Gamlen into doing the same.

The week after Maria is born they remain locked inside their apartment, Malcolm channelling what little healing magic he knows into Leandra, wrapping up their affairs in town, packing the little possessions they have. Leandra is struck by how good he is at this, that he does it without flinching, without even stopping to mourn the little community they had for these months.

“This is life, Leandra,” he tells her, wrapping Maria in a bedsheet and fashioning it as a bandolier against her chest, a baby sling, she thinks hysterically, remembering the iron-wrought Orlesian prams she saw in Hightown and the nurses and servants that pushed them. She breastfeeds her own child, a painful process that truly makes her appreciate the tradition of wet nurses. She envies her former friends and classmates, even as she is fiercely proud of herself, for making this precious solemn creature and pushing her out of herself and raising her on her own breast, a woman in natural state, closer to Andraste and her ways than any noblewoman.

“We run,” Malcolm says, pressing a thumb to her chin, looking her in the eyes in a way that would mean a kiss from someone else. He is entirely serious, without quarter: Hawke, as he is. As they are. “For as long as we have to.”

“As long as we have to,” Leandra agrees, little Maria wrinkling her nose against her chest. It is wide like hers, and she hopes it grows with a hook like Malcolm’s, perfect for pressing kisses to. “Together.”

Malcolm takes her hand for a moment, and then shoulders their packs, his staff slung across his back as a stave with a sharp blade at the end, animal charms bound to it with twine in the Chasind tradition. They leave the building with their neighbours’ eyes on their backs, not a single goodbye or well-wish. Leandra Hawke and her apostate husband and their newborn child who, if the Maker is good, will inherit none of the magic so potent through both her parents’ veins, leave. He has whispered to her of a village on the very cusp of his Korkarki Wilds, by the name of Lothering, where they could live – following the coast, Amaranthine to Denerim to Gwaren, stopping whenever they need to, or fancy to, keeping each other safe until they can start a new life together.

She writes a single, curt letter to her parents, telling them they have a granddaughter, and then turns her back on the Waking Sea to face her future.

**Author's Note:**

> guess who started playing dragon age ii again like a fucking idiot
> 
> re: chasind names according to the wikia there are chasind characters with names like zoya and old stoyanka and that strikes me as inherently russian/slavic, so??? shrug??


End file.
